Sunday, April 5, 2015

If we want to know which sex possesses the more
finely attuned capacity for empathy, culture warriors will proclaim that women
are more empathetic because they are in closer touch with their emotions. This
implies that women are better at interpersonal relationships, especially the
kinds the involve shared feelings.

If we want to know which sex makes quicker and more rational
judgments when faced with moral dilemmas, researchers have now shown that men do so because their rational faculties are not
muddled by emotion.

Uh, oh!

NPR reports on the study, which used, among others, the
following hypothetical:

You
find a time machine and travel to 1920. A young Austrian artist and war veteran
named Adolf Hitler is staying in the hotel room next to yours. The doors aren't
locked, so you could easily stroll next door and smother him. World War II
would never happen.

But
Hitler hasn't done anything wrong yet. Is it acceptable to kill him to prevent
World War II?

The results suggest that men are more likely to be willing
to murder the future tyrant. Yet, it is fair to say that women, being
constitutionally weaker, might doubt their ability to smother anyone,
especially a grown man.

The researchers suggest that women hesitate and demur
because they are more conflicted. They are more conflicted because they give
more weight to their feelings. Thus, they have a harder time deciding.

NPR continues:

"Women
seem to be more likely to have this negative, emotional, gut-level reaction to
causing harm to people in the dilemmas, to the one person, whereas men were
less likely to express this strong emotional reaction to harm," Rebecca Friesdorf, the
lead author of the study, tells Shots.

And also:

"Women
seem to be feeling more equal levels of both emotion and cognition. They seem
to be experiencing similar levels of both, so it's more difficult for them to
make their choice," she says.

Or else, examine another hypothetical used by the
researchers. In this one people were asked whether they would pimp out a daughter to a porn movie director in order to save the family farm:

"You
are the head of a poor household in a developing country. Your crops have
failed for the second year in a row, and it appears that you have no way to
feed your family. Your sons, ages 8 and 10, are too young to go off to the city
where there are jobs, but your daughter could fare better.

"You
know a man from your village who lives in the city and who makes sexually
explicit films featuring girls such as your daughter. In front of your
daughter, he tells you that in one year of working in his studio, your daughter
could earn enough money to keep your family fed for several growing seasons.

"Is
it appropriate for you to employ your daughter in the pornography industry in
order to feed your family?"

The study reports that very, very few people would accept
the bargain… if you wish to call it that. Evidently, the moral obligation to
protect a child’s dignity trumps all other considerations.

What difference does this difference make?

Friesdorf suggests that it shows that men and women
executives make decisions differently:

Even
though the dilemmas seem far-fetched, Friesdorf says we encounter less dramatic
variations of them all the time.

For
instance, a manager might need to make an employment decision that would weigh
the future of one person against the fate of a group. "If these [gender]
differences also hold in that context, then that could have some implications
for how women and men are making those decisions," she says.

Women, in other words, think more about the consequences for
an individual while men are more able to think in terms of the good of the
group.

Does this make men better executives? And, what would Sheryl
Sandberg say about this?

Take a less dramatic example—of my invention-- from the
business world.

What should a manager do when one of his staff members is so
incompetent that he is damaging sales, company reputation and profitability? If
this person continues with the company he will destroy the careers of everyone
around him, including his manager.

Now, let’s make the situation gut-wrenching. Imagine that
this staff member is a widower who is the sole support of two small children. Perhaps,
one of the children has special needs or suffers from an illness that can only
be treated through the company health insurance. If he is fired he will have a
great difficulty finding a job and this will surely hurt his children. He will
have to go on the Obamacare exchanges and his child’s physician and hospital
will not accept the insurance offered there.

Now, what do you do?

What influences your decision more, your empathy for the
employee’s life circumstances or the good of the company?

In the best circumstances, employers will try to find a mean
between the two extremes. They will find another job in the company where the
poorly performing employee can do the least damage, while keeping his salary
and health insurance.

They would be willing to take a small hit to the bottom line
in order to help this man out.

Even though this appears to be the best alternative, it
represents a clear public humiliation for the demoted employee.

If, however, this solution is not available, the research
study suggests that a female manager will be more likely to feel sympathy for
the employee’s life circumstances while the male manager will more likely look
to what is best for the company.

3 comments:

An out-of control trolley is racing down the tracks, and will run over a group of 5 people, who you have no way to warm. You have control of a track switch, and can divert the trolley to another track...one which *one* person is standing. Do you kill the one and save the five, or let events take their course?

Are ALL women more emotional than ALL men, and all men more rational than ALL women? Probably not. There's surely some sort of bell curve with a wide overlap, assuming the terms can actually be quantified properly in some context.

And if we go into fairy tale dilemma, why is it the step mothers who get to be heartless, like Hansel and Gretel? Not enough food, let's lead the children into the forest and leave them there, and we can have more kids later?!

So perhaps that's just archetypal myth of mother abandonment or something? But we know of not a few cases of mothers killing their children by various means.

You might wonder whether emotional or rational people are capable of greater violence. An emotional person might kill in a moment of passion, while a rational person might kill in a way that protects them from being caught.

Or maybe all questions of murder or mercy killings are so outside of norman human experience, that we can't say anything at all.

The Trolley Problem always seemed stupid to me, especially Part-2, would you push the fat man onto the tracks to save the people, even as if life had certainty, and you can predict outcomes by Spock-like rational probabilities.

My guess is men and women both are generally cowards, and generally resist any responsibility to harm to anyone, and those who do desire leadership positions have to in part become "less human", abandoning parts of their emotional sides, and letting so-called rationality be a crutch to justify decisions that claim to meet the needs of the whole over the individual, or helping the individual's future, even at pain now.

My own moral dilemma came evicting my drug-using brother from my house after he had homeless people in the house stealing things, forging checks, etc, and I let things go way too far, but when I made the final decision, I had to convince myself if he was "dead on the street" in 6 months, it couldn't be my responsibility. I wasn't convinced, but I just knew letting him stay longer wasn't helping him, and Minnesota winters are encouraging to get him into a drug program.

But there were no probability tables for me to consult. It was just time to stop enabling.